For team officials, season for draft dodging has arrived

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Cover your ears. Avert your eyes. Believe none of what you hear and only some of what you see. The NFL Draft is in season.

If the truth is a lie agreed upon (Napoleon), the NFL Draft is a pack of lies with institutional imprimatur, a tangled web of deceit and diversion that is as much a part of the selection process as a 40-yard clocking or the Wonderlic test.

If you're not privy to the private deliberations of a professional football team, you should take everything you hear with a pillar of salt. Most of what is said for public consumption is designed for professional confusion.

Outside of the inner circles, anyone who thinks he knows something has probably been duped. Rumors are planted to camouflage a team's intentions. Trips are taken for the sole purpose of throwing others off the scent.

“It's been done before and it's been done by me,” Chargers General Manager A.J. Smith admitted Sunday afternoon. “It's an extremely competitive business. There are 32 teams and all 32 teams talk about the same group of players.”

NFL teams tend toward paranoia, but the artful ones play their draft positions with the skill of elite poker players. They plant rumors and stage elaborate ruses designed to make their rivals miscalculate, to make them reach when it's not really necessary; or they move so secretly that their real intentions remain invisible.

In 1993, the New York Jets perpetuated the myth that they had targeted Georgia running back Garrison Hearst – a player they had no intention of taking – and the ploy panicked the then-Phoenix Cardinals into trading running back Johnny Johnson for the privilege of moving up one slot in the first round.

In 2006, then-Denver coach Mike Shanahan took pains to avoid the appearance of being interested in Vanderbilt quarterback Jay Cutler.

Though the Broncos never bothered to work Cutler out, they traded up to take him with their first-round selection. If things have since soured in Denver for the coach and his quarterback, Shanahan's stealth operations deserve study by the CIA.

So with that prolonged preface, please bear in mind that what the Chargers are going to do with the No. 16 selection in the first round on April 25 is as-yet unknown and perhaps unknowable.

In his early mock drafts, The San Diego Union-Tribune's intrepid Kevin Acee twice has projected the Chargers taking Ohio State running back Chris “Beanie” Wells, and he makes a solid case based on who else figures to be available at No. 16 and how much more the Chargers think they can get from LaDainian Tomlinson.

It's one thing to want an offensive tackle, for example, but quite another thing to find one worthy of the No. 16 selection if Baylor's Jason Smith, Virginia's Eugene Monroe and Alabama's Andre Smith all have been claimed before the Chargers choose.

Yet deductive reasoning is not the same thing as definitive proof in pro football, and inside information isn't always reliable when it comes to the draft. The hunch here is that Wells is a smoke screen; that fresh from re-negotiating Tomlinson's contract and applying a franchise tag to Darren Sproles, the Chargers have more pressing needs than another back.